Free The Circuit by Bob Shepherd Page B

weeks, then handed us a heavy blue mail bag.
    I looked inside the bag; there were two AK47s in very good condition with twelve magazines full of ammunition. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning – Martin and I were beaming. We thanked the ops officer profusely. There he was busy fighting a war with his own lads to look after, and he still found time to help us out. He was a very good Rupert (officer) indeed.
    We were anxious to get out to the incident area to start our investigation, but first, we had to test-fire our new weapons. There was a track off the main highway near the area which we wanted to recce, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and fire our weapons there.
    The track was made of gravel and dirt and moved east in a straight line from the highway to a small industrial park three miles away. The first third of the track was bordered by irrigation ditches which by that point had become filled with pools of thick, black tar that had seeped in from the canals surrounding Basra. In addition to setting the oil pipelines on fire, the Iraqis had also dumped oil in the canals with an eye towards igniting them once the British launched a full-scale invasion.
    Driving down the track, I felt like we were slicing through two realities; to our left the billowing soot from burning oil pipelines consumed the sky like a creeping black cancer. To our right, the sky was big, blue and blindingly clear. After about half a mile, we passed a group of Red Crescent volunteers whom we identified from the crimson emblems on their shirts. They were pulling dead Iraqis out of the irrigation ditches. The oil-soaked corpses were a gruesome sight, but I thought at least the bodies had fallen into shallow pools where they could be seen and recovered. Had they been disposed of in deeper canals, no one would ever know for sure what had happened to those people.
    After two miles we pulled over onto a patch of broken ground. We got out of our vehicle and scanned the area to ensure that no one was in viewing distance. It looked good. We couldn’t even hear the traffic from the main highway. Improvising targets from tufts of weeds and debris, we test-fired our weapons and magazines and zeroed the sights to our eyes. To our delight, everything worked perfectly. I tucked my pistol inside the front flap of my body armour where it would be hidden from view but close at hand. Martin and I then positioned the AKs inside the vehicle where we could get to them quickly. Finally, we wrapped the extra magazines in small grab bags and tucked them between the seats.
    The weapons sorted, we headed back up the track. Before we reached the highway, we decided to stop and search the irrigation ditches. We couldn’t rule out the possibility that the bodies of Fred and Hussein had ended up there. Martin scanned the murky water to one side of the road while I trolled the other. After a few minutes, we noticed dust rising from a vehicle driving towards us from the highway. There was no activity at the industrial park so it was very possible that the vehicle had turned down the track for the sole purpose of checking us out.
    I stayed on the road while Martin returned to our 4x4 to cover me with the AK. As the vehicle got closer I could see it contained four passengers, all male. I wondered what they were up to. If their intentions were innocent perhaps they’d be willing to talk. They could have information that could help us.
    The vehicle slowed to a crawl twenty yards short of where I stood. The men were sizing me up, as I was them; they were all dressed in black and ranged in age from early twenties to mid-thirties. All the windows in their vehicle were rolled down.
    I looked at Martin and he nodded back at me. I felt a whole lot safer knowing he had me covered. I kept my arms at my side and away from the flap of my body armour; I didn’t want the men to think for a second that I might be armed.
    As the vehicle drew level with me, I offered a